Category Archives: crm

Now that summer is coming to a close no better time to get started writing about CRM. Although I think there is value in doing more with a video blog (more on that to come) I have a hot topic I wanted to get out in the open. Over the past 15 years I have spent a significant amount of time with accounting firms and their partners. About five years ago my team started down the path of scoping out an industry solution for professional firms like legal and accounting. Like most who enter into a new arena there was a vast difference between casual knowledge and consulting level knowledge.

As we moved down the path to understand more and more about the needs of these firms it became apparent that there was going to be a fundamental shift in the way that I thought about everything. This means assessing all aspects of analysis, training, and even customization. This also means that I would need to make sure that anyone that would get engaged on a project for an accounting firm would essentially need most, but not all domain expertise. Understandably, the operational side of accounting is a bit unique and partners do not have time to educate every consultant they come into contact with.

Is your CRM consultant an expert on your industry?

So, this got me to thinking… does the solution a company chooses for their CRM need to be industry specific? Or, is it more likely the consultants need to have depth in your particular industry? Like any good consultant I put my experience to work and started down the path of collecting data to reach some conclusions.

Initially, one of the things that I needed to understand and communicate back to you is the the history on how the different technology scenarios have developed. Lets start with the easiest first.

Horizontal CRM – Think of this as your Salesforce and Microsoft platforms that can be utilized by literally any type of business. For the enterprise (integrated with ERP) think SAP and Oracle. The benefits of these platforms is that they are drivers for innovation in the industry. And, if you have specific needs to reach your goals, there can be a significant amount of configuration and/or customization to reach operational efficiency with your strategic goals.

Industry (Vertical CRM) – In this category you have too many solutions to name but think of an application that is advertised as a CRM tool that is specific to your line of business. Many of these applications have evolved over the years and some are now even either migrating to the cloud or rewriting their applications away from the world of on premise technology. The benefit to these types of offerings is that they require much less time to get going and require much less training. The downside is that many CRM providers of industry solutions do not have significant investment dollars to provide the best mobile solutions or an expanded market of 3rd party complimentary solutions.

Platform CRM – Now that CRM has become a foundation of what any business needs to have to be successful many of the software publishers already mentioned have decided to leverage their best of breed solutions and create industry template versions of their CRM technologies. Even many of the implementation partners are now specializing in creating templates of their own for verticals or micro-verticals. Without going into details this provides the best of both worlds because the fast implementation time is available with the flexibility to personalize to your specific firm nuances.

OK, you now have a big picture on what your options are within the marketplace when deciding what might work as a CRM option for your organization. That being said technology doesn’t configure itself and most organizations don’t necessarily want to make heavy internal investments so they rely on consultancies to help them role out a new CRM. Here is my assessment of how you should probably look at professionals that you evaluate to work on a system for you.

Horizontal CRM Consultants – This is the most common scenario as you reach out to a publisher or talk to a trusted adviser that points you in the direction of someone to help you implement a solution. The benefit you get in this scenario is having consultants specialized in CRM with creative abilities to make any particular configuration effective. Unfortunately, many of these consultants need to be educated on your business and the time and money spent to get to the value can be considerable.

Industry Consultants – In many cases there are management consultants that have significant depth in your particular industry. There is little to no education on both the pain points or the operational processes that you live in every day. These consultants are generally not technology experts so the opposite is true when it comes to these consultants getting up to speed on what the horizontal or industry specific CRM tools can provide.

Vertical CRM Consultants – Much like the Vertical CRM built on a best of breed platform your Vertical CRM consultants have both the depth of knowing what is technically possible and how your particular industry works. These types of consultants also have the experience of spending time in many different types of firms like yours and giving you inputs on both technology and process. While these experts may come at a little higher price they can get you to your end goal effectively and quickly.

Taking all of these things into consideration I can only reach one conclusion: If possible, you should have a vertical CRM consultant with a vertical CRM solution built on a best of breed platform. If you find that you need to choose it would be better to stick with a robust platform and have a CRM expert in your industry transform the generic tool into one that works for your business.

After spending last week on the road in Toronto meeting with multiple implementation partners and software publishers inadvertently I stumbled upon a common theme that seemed worthy of blogging about. One of the things that I have noticed about CRM that is different now than 5 years ago is that as these “business platforms” have evolved many people on both the consulting and customer side have gotten lost in the essence of what we are trying to solve for and where that should drive our priorities.

Business 101 says charge a dollar, justify the dollar, do a great job, collect the dollar, and then do it over and over again. I know, it’s very basic but with where I am going here that is the point. Many small businesses are passionate about what they do when they wake up every day and then they spend the rest of the day doing many of these other things so that they can get back to the reason they woke up this morning. As the business grows they can spend more time doing what they love and hire for the other necessities. And, eventually, if selling isn’t what they love, they will eventually need a CRM because not having one will keep them up at night.

For the most part people call this emerging business or the SMB marketplace and it is not only the major job creator in the US and Canada but also the most challenging area to get CRM right. And now some things are happening that may be changing the landscape to make things easier with the new announcements from Salesforce and Sage. More importantly, there are already hundreds of thousands of these companies that won’t be using these new tools for smaller business because they are already beyond its intended market. So what to do now?

1. Enable – Take a look at what it means to bring a dollar in and turn your organization into an upside down pyramid with the president/owner at the bottom and the sales teams at the top. Then take an approach to CRM that frees them up to do whatever it takes to find the next customer. It’s funny that many times CRM gets sideways or complex and in some respects becomes a damper on business development rather than fueling natural will and desire from your sales people.

2. Augment – One of the value propositions in this recent announcement from Sage and Salesforce is leveraging the concept that the closer you get to “one version of the truth” in a single operational system the better off all employees will be. As the IoT (Internet of Things) helps us become more connected we have fewer and fewer reasons not to leverage information that can help us succeed. If we don’t have connected systems we should look at the cost of both connecting them and not connecting them in order to get better productivity and output.

3. Simplify – Just because your business is growing doesn’t mean that you need to make things harder as you get bigger. If you don’t really know how to keep things simple then look for outside help. Unfortunately business performance for emerging companies often comes down to simple things like cash flow and focus rather than the viability of your products and services. As a case in point you might want to consider using something like CRM the way it is designed rather than trying to modify things to exactly how you execute today.

4. Analyze – With the amount of data available to even midsize organizations it’s amazing how little discipline people are willing to apply to looking at the data that’s in front of them rather than continually missing the mark on any number of strategic goals. If people have a system that is available anytime and anywhere then you can use travel time or gaps in your calendar to better understand where you are in relation to your goals and how to change quickly in order to get on track.

5. Change – For those of us in the world of CRM we have seen that a predisposition to change and the benefits it can bring can be exponential for results. As an example the Internet has changed how we all think and therefore the way that we all buy. If you have smart people and a good offering many times we need to be nimble in order to maximize our potential. One of the great benefits with today’s technology is the ability to track just about anything easily and then quantify with metrics.

Taking these actions seem simple enough but many firms we meet with often have a negative connotation for what CRM is and how complicated it has become. The reality is that CRM is very powerful and when done right it can help you get to the next level. The cripplers are technology that doesn’t make sense to the user, data that is unreliable, and enabling staff to use it when they want to but not as a condition of employment. These things can all be solved but it takes energy, effort, and enforcement in order to reach your business objectives.

In the early days of CRM there was no cloud, no wide range of options, and nowhere near the complexity these tools provide for integration. That being said the adoption rates for most CRM products floundered in the 25-35 percent range because of the way the products were introduced to companies and how they were implemented. All practitioners share some level of blame but so do most organizations. The problem back then is that technology was big and complex and nothing was easy. Add in sales and customer service professionals that are under high demand to deliver for their respective teams and there is no doubt why many firms went down with the ship when they made their first or second efforts on CRM.

Fast forward to today and we have unbelievably flexible CRM tools in the cloud that offer all the bells and whistles you would ever want in a platform or a feature set. When you look at what big players like Salesforce and Microsoft and Oracle have done it’s like and amusement park for CRM junkies like me. Add in what players like Zoho and Sage are doing for the mid market (or SME as it is often referred to) and it is amazing to see what tools exist for literally every size company and every price point. So, we must be reaching CRM nirvana, right? Even the pundits out there areying that we are now starting to reach the outer limits of CRM innovation.

Not so fast my friends. Unfortunately, for those of us who work in this market assisting companies with their initial or ongoing enhancements to their CRM initiatives, there is an ugly truth when it comes to making CRM a meaningful venture that provides not only efficiency but competitive advantage. Even after all of the advances in technology and the cloud we haven’t even reached the 50% mark for successful implementations across the CRM universe. The reasons are many and the purpose of this article is not to discourage but to let people know they are not alone. People moving from CRM to CRM is still relatively high and many customers are regularly raising their hands asking for help.

So here are a few tell tale signs that your CRM implementation is struggling and some tips for getting back on track:

CRM Login Statistics – There is no better indicator of a troubled system than reviewing login details and finding out that more than a few people are not using the system. One or two can be handled individually but when numbers of people are not logging in the best thing to do is review with the team what CRM does not provide that they need or the configuration may be too complex or daunting for their job description.

Incomplete Data – Using a CRM needs to provide benefit to a user and not just the company that employs them. We often find lots of missing data and this can cause lots of problems at many levels. One cause may be that users don’t see what the benefits are to their individual roles when asking for the data or that data points are not as valuable as originally envisioned. Data augmentation can help but so can cleaning up the system so that it is relevant to your current business needs.

Circumventing the System – Too often we find that in many organizations a CRM system is rolled out and there are specific expectations and requirements as a function of a user’s role in your company. Then, based on any number of factors, we then hear from employees that the same rules don’t apply to all employees. Using a CRM system effectively relies on a certain level of corporate discipline in order to reach results.

System Design – When many firms start taking on CRM they do it quickly with little attention to just the specific functions that people need to have in order to get their job done. It’s amazing how many times we come in to help someone and many of the “out of the box” functions that are not relevant to an organization are still present and making the day to day kluge and complicated. Working with a consultant to streamline the solution can get you off and running before you know it.

No Integration – Even for smaller companies there is great value in integrating things like an ERP system. When users have to rely on each other with email and phone calls for information that should be readily available they spend less and less time in the system that should make their lives easier. With the tools in many of today’s CRM platforms integration is easier than you think and very powerful for day to day tasks as well as marketing and analytics.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but these items are certainly a good start for understanding where your CRM struggles may lie. The most important thing is to have an expert take a look and do some type of forensics with you to help you understand where your quick wins might be in getting you down the path to CRM success.

No, we’re not talking about the weather. Although that has been a very timely topic here in the Northeast with record snow we are still dealing with. What we are actually talking about is the challenges of traditional CRM consultants for on premise technology and the challenges they face shifting to the cloud mentality.

In the past 3 weeks I have been in two separate continents with two major software publishers and the messaging is the same, “Move your business to the cloud…now!”. Funny thing is that the challenge for these traditional consultants is actually the same for these publishers. Many software publishers are learning how to do business all over again or becoming a dinosaur like IBM.

With such an active discussion in the software and software consulting community I thought it was ripe analysis with a blog post. First, we will take a look at the problem from a publisher perspective. Then, we shift to the concepts that make the model a challenge for traditional consulting structures.

As a publisher the old model was based on the fact that in order to be able to have a successful customer there needed to be a guided implementation, often with customization, and traditional project management methodology. In order to accomplish this a firm would need to staff and manage utilization of its resources. For their troubles there was margin (often significant margin) and they would keep all margin on services over and above labor costs and expenses.

Publishers have realized that with cloud their business model has shifted. The need to surrender margin is less, the sales process is shorter, and the long term value of the customer is greater. The other true reality is that the relationship with partners is also significantly different. And publishers should be willing to “let go” because many of these consulting firms will not be able to make the fundamental mental shift to doing business in the cloud.

Why won’t traditional CRM business partners or ERP business partners be able to shift? Well, because the cloud DNA is fundamentally different and while people can change their clothes easily it’s almost impossible to change their DNA. As a lesson well learned in the past 10 years to use and example think about how many traditional technology resellers have been able to convert from being good ERP shops to good CRM shops. Realistically, very few, because the DNA of CRM consultancies is uniquely different from ERP.

So, in my opinion, as the traditional on premise technologies accelerate the cloud execution, they will essentially wake up to a new cloud channel in the next three to five years. The cloud is just different. Many people in traditional consulting roles are having a very hard time adjusting to the concepts in the cloud as well. For instance, customers tend to have a higher level of responsibility and the consultancies are use more for enabling, teaching and expertise.

The talent pool for cloud is also different than those higher priced resources that we might traditionally employ for on premise CRM business analysts or developers. Technical expertise will wain for higher energy and high availability of resources by having lower cost resources that are easy to reach. These resources will then evolve and become our cloud leaders for tomorrow. This is a fundamental DNA shift that many cloud only CRM consultancies already understand because it is the only way they have ever done business.

At the end of the day it’s not personal, it’s just business. Many consultancies will add or drop products this year as a change in strategy or focus. So on premise software providers need to face the reality that many of their existing partners are “cloudy” for a reason and it may just be easier to build a new channel rather than trying to change DNA. It’s just a hunch but let’s see how it plays out.

Happy New Year to all and I have been so busy writing for other publications like Search CRM and Destination CRM I have been neglecting some of my blog duties. Nevertheless, here we are again waking up to another promising year and and even more innovative year in the world of CRM. When you look at some of what SAP brought us last year in their CRM suite, Microsoft’s dynamic improvements (yes, pun intended), and Salesforce’s next Wave (couldn’t help myself) of functionality one has to ask where their priorities should be in trying to make their CRM better. The answer, surprisingly, may not be in what you put in or what you take out.. it may be on how you provide a better user navigation and ease of use to those whose job it is to navigate and use your CRM every day.

I wrote an article a while back talking about the shiny new toy syndrome in CRM and how software vendors and SaaS publishers are always jumping to the next big thing. And, while innovation is great and some of us don’t have any idea of how we would get along without some of those innovations, it is increasingly hard to get any type of momentum and real productivity gains when we are constantly shifting that which we have not perfected. There are lots of examples to site so we will run through a few of them and then talk about some methods for ensuring that we know how to “throttle”what goes into production, why it goes in, and when it goes in.

In the small market CRM one of the biggest tragedies are emerging companies that try to bit off more than they can handle as it relates to CRM. The goal for most smaller organizations using CRM is to get a handle on communicating (email marketing) and bringing their people together in one unified place to handle either customer service issues or maintain a pipeline. Yet, many small organizations have jumped directly to integration to accounting or modifying their mobile experience when they haven’t gotten the basics down. What this leads to is confusion with the small number of users about what they should be doing and spending their time with. The end result is usually a lower adoption rate and questioning the value of CRM by team members.

Midsize organizations suffer from a different type of complex. Many of them are using CRM to try and solidify operational and sales process. Yet, many of them go overboard on customization and mapping of CRM to how they currently operate rather than trying to see if they would be better off learning why certain core functionality of CRM operates a certain way. What this leads to, in many cases, is the desire to plug in too many add on apps or needing to customize those apps to meet customization done on the core technology. The end result is much like the smaller organizations where users either have confusion on exactly what the goals of their usage of CRM should be rather than meeting business goals that have been clearly defined by the functionality. Not to say that the CRM won’t be extended over time but it is important to know why you are using specific apps and how they will enable meeting those business goals.

The last group are those enterprise organizations and their challenges are much more about priorities than they are about what CRM does for their organization. When there are competing groups inside an organization and some are driving for specific capabilities there is often not a good process for understanding how making these changes will impact the usability for the population as a whole. Often times we see that when one group has more of a mind share from internal project managers the other groups are left behind and their goals for CRM also get left behind. This is why it is important to have a feedback loop and a prioritization of what changes are made and their strategic value to the entire firm nut just and individual group. At the very least there should be a phased approach to enabling new apps and technology within an environment so that each constituency can have a measure of success in terms of business results.

So here are a few keys to establishing a process for reviewing, evaluating, and enabling new apps or functionality with your CRM instance.

1. Establish a CRM committee which includes users at all levels for discussing organizational challenges and goals on a periodic basis.

Whenever you go down the path of doing something new the end result will most likely end up somewhere other than you intended. Hitting the mark and meeting expectations is harder and harder to manage and working with technology is no different. The concept of using workflow can be a very powerful tool but there are some things that you really need to consider and some groundwork that needs to be done in order to capture the essence of how a workflow will make teams and individuals on those teams better. Here are some of those considerations that will make a difference in whether your execution will be meaningful or messy.

CAN IT BE MANAGED? The first and most important thing to understand about workflow is that there needs to be clear definition of what the desired outcomes are at the back end and who the players are in the process you are trying to streamline. In the consulting world it is not uncommon for us to see that our customers will run us through a process only to find out that there are actually three or more workflows within a process that have distinct outcomes along the way. And the other common occurrence we see is that people often try to control elements or people in a way that is either too fluid or people that do not work directly for the firm.

DOES IT ENCAPSULATE YOUR CULTURE? There will never be a substitute for people and what they do to make our companies great. When you look at companies like Amazon and Zappos their passion for the customer comes through with an obsessive and relentless pursuit of getting the customer whatever they need. Part of an individual team member’s ability to do that in those organizations is that people are empowered to say “yes”. The relevance to workflow is to understand that the premise is generally to lock processes down or limit where a process goes and what outcomes can be reached. We often see the best systems inlaid with flexibility in workflow to handle business exceptions.

ARE YOU PREPARED FOR CONSTANT CHANGE? The final danger to think through is to understand that workflow involves the process of mapping. It is analogous in the technology world of building sidewalks between buildings on a college campus. If you have spent any time on any of this nation’s beautiful campuses one of things you will usually see some level of construction happening almost all of the time. The reality is that from the moment one of those sidewalks is put down the countdown has started to the day that sidewalk will get moved, rerouted or ripped up completely. This is an important lesson for workflow as the pace of change in our daily business lives means that we must also put in proactive evaluation and a process for changing. Remember that every technology has a shelf life and unfortunately process management is one of the shortest.

Realistically, there are other dangers regarding workflow but if you try to focus on too many things at once it’s hard to be successful. If you use these guidelines and tenants in how your approach workflow you will be more successful. If handling these basics aren’t met, however, it will be nearly impossible to have your team embracing all of the positive aspects of what workflow can actually do for your company and your customer engagements.

Welcome to the Practical CRM blog. I have been working in the field of customer relationship management for nearly 20 years and through the prompting from many of my colleagues and customers I decided to take the lessons learned over the years and give anyone interested in CRM some insights and guidance from thousands of customer interactions in hopes that we all learn something and get better with CRM concepts and approaches. This site is not intended to be product specific but more about the people, process and the application of technology.

One of the most interesting circumstances that we see in the CRM industry is the level of flexibility in our customer’s project teams and the fluidity of the user constituency in changing objectives and priorities for their CRM projects. There are many causes of this phenomenon and we will discuss a few of them here. More importantly, I will highlight the newest CRM “toys” and give my opinion on those most relevant to the business climate today.

Before we get into which toys and why it’s probably just as important for consulting and internal project teams to understand why technology is evolving so quickly in this industry. There is no doubt that capital investment from software publishers and SaaS players, coupled with an explosion of accessibility methods and devices, has been the driver here. Add in the fact that there is now a blend between the personal and business aspects of the social space and now you have essentially the perfect storm for CRM innovation.

As many people know I prefer not to get into product specifics as I have to during countless boardroom sessions but I think it’s fair to mention that its not just the CRM providers that are making strides but the ancillary offerings that are also pacing the innovation. With robust market places and constant messaging more and more companies have gone away from concentrating on core business drivers and are focusing on how to “adapt” the newest app or gadget to CRM because they bought in that somehow it equates to competitive advantage.

Let’s dive into five hot capabilities in CRM and give you the skinny on how and where they fit.

Social “Anything” – Just look at almost anything related to CRM and you will see the word social attached to it. This concept is certainly harder for a B2B environment to pull off and the closer you are to dealing with individuals and consumers this has actual value to you. For those in recruiting, consumer goods, fund raising, and retail you have a winner. If you are in another industry and having a hard time visualizing how it applies maybe cool your jets and wait to see a practical application in your industry.

Reputation Management – This capability is also evolving from the “social” sphere and is also labeled social media monitoring. This function can (but does not necessarily) relate to both B2C and B2B but the practical application is probably more in areas where there is heavy investment in brand and where products or services are highly transactional. So if you have a product in grocery stores or retail then it applies but if you are a regional general contractor or technology reseller not so much.

Collaboration – So far we have seen two sides of the coin on this one. There is definite value depending on the situation. If you have a complex, distributed or team selling approach then connecting with team members and sharing intelligence or making split second decisions has value. If you run field sales and service operations there can also be a nice tie in for people to communicate at the central point of concern and resolve customer issues or strategize on managing relationships. If, however, your shop is all about talking and analysis through paralysis some managers have complained that collaboration is just another productivity killer so you have to set rules and boundaries.

Portals – Watch more discussion about portals as one of the catch phrases that will continue to evolve in 2013. The general idea of portals, ecosystems and communities is that there are centralized places for people to work with each other and produce synergies around a common set of objectives. The drawback is that if you can’t readily layout a structure and are “pushing” to define a solution you may not be the best candidate.

Mobile – Now here is the real value add in terms of new capabilities that really matter. We have finally come to the point where information should be available anywhere and anytime so that users can consume at a time and place that makes a difference in their ability to produce either revenue or results. We live in a society where everything happens in Internet speed. If we can’t transact the same way that our users or customers expect then they are at risk of finding someone who can. The only caution is that users should temper expectations of pushing full functionality of any desktop system into a mobile experience. The key driver here is the concept of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

So, as you head into the Holiday Season and start to eat your body weight in goodies and look at lots of shiny new toys, don’t forget that there is a difference between marketing hype and practical application of technology in your business. If you don’t know how something will fit that a vendor is pushing really hard then just wait until you have a solid business case for deploying new capabilities.

It only took about a decade but after enough CRM evangelists beating the drum for a long enough period of time I believe that the concept of CRM is finally starting to hold mind share with executives and other strategic thinkers inside of most organizations. For years and years many have struggled to figure out what CRM means and now more and more people are assessing the value of CRM as it applies to their organizations.

Right after Y2K many of us that sat in the board room across from many sales, service or operations people. In those meetings we espoused the virtues of CRM only to watch a fair number of those projects go down in flames. How did it happen? Was it the product? Was it the approach? Was it the mentality of the user community? Was it the lack of common database standards? Was it inability to integrate successfully with ERP of back end systems? If you said “all of the above” you are partially correct.

Assuming that you agree that all of the preceding factors could have a significant impact in the success of a project there was also plenty of blame to go around on the implementation side of the table. There were many people that took and ERP approach and designated systems as reporting engines and forced them from the top down. There were just as many project managers that took a “big project” approach and bit off way more than they could chew. It didn’t matter what the technology or its capabilities the size of the projects sunk many deployments.

So what has changed over the past 10 years? Just about everything has shifted and one of the most important shifts has come through the sheer availability and affordability of CRM for just about every type of organization. With availability the came out as the cloud solutions flooded the market came more and more every day users that have had exposure to some type of CRM. The tools have also gotten better but we will get to that shortly. As people have had experience with CRM the conversations in the board room have shifted from “Will it work?” to “How do I make it work?”

The number of people with significant CRM project experience has also grown considerably and with that knowledge and best practices have emerged. For those of us that started in the world of packaged software the argument used to be whether the best choice was on premise or the cloud. Now most of us have evolved past that argument and now we look at that decision as simply a deployment option. The good news with the evolution of cloud computing is that users now have a simple expectation that CRM is available when and where they need it.

If you talk to any of the industry analysts they will tell you that everyone is talking about mobile and tablets and having the data and the tools at your fingertips that enable good decision making or empower customer facing employees. What this tells me at the very least is that many of our industries sales people are no longer selling the concept of CRM but selling the concept of why their capabilities and delivery methods are better than someone else’s. This also tells me that decision makers sitting in the chair now get the fact that CRM is imperative and done correctly can be a significant competitive weapon.

Now we start to look at what will matter for the next 10 years…

There is no doubt that the tools that are in use now are significantly better than where we were a decade ago. I mentioned this earlier in this post but the winners in CRM technology will be the companies that understand the commitment to innovation and providing new and meaningful ways to give front line personnel the ability to interact with their customers and their peers to provide high levels of service or real time information to buyers. The sheer pace at which CRM tools are evolving at this point is almost mind boggling. That is fantastic news because we don’t have too many industries where we are the clear leader.

I think that the evolution of CRM is going to be an exciting journey and I am convinced that those of us that continue to learn and grow with this market will see many exciting success stories now that we don’t have to try and convince stakeholders that CRM is a necessity and not an optional undertaking.

It’s funny that ten years ago we were trying to explain the concepts of Customer Relationship Management and just trying to get buy in for putting these types of applications into many organizations. There were certainly skeptics and many unwilling players in countless Sales and Service organizations. There are still a number of hold outs but for the most part we now have fairly deep penetration of CRM applications as an every day business tool.

When it comes to adoption and thinking out of the box we are not quite there. I see too many organizations using these tools in a very manual way that actually drives adoption in the opposite direction and makes their day to day job functions more complex. It is apparent when you see this type of firm because many of the CRM functions are done in a “Lego” or building block type of implementation. Essentially, the company will take the step by step marketing > lead > opportunity flow and put just as many manual steps in their technology that they had in their pre-crm environments.

The reality is that many of today’s tools can be much more interactive with what many of us use to consider “dead” data. As an example we can utilize the e-marketing weapons in many of the CRM products today to not just communicate marketing messaging but also to query current customers and prospects with surveys and requests that can drive significant value to your firm.

Proactive firms today understand that leveraging information is the key to success. Happy customers or willing prospects will happily share information that relates to getting better service or solving their business problems. The customer landscape never stops changing and the ability to source feedback at a relatively low cost will enable your teams to reach their goals faster and enable you to be relevant and responsive.

I have been telling many executives for years that your CRM implementation is always in a phase and will never be completed. Until the day that you sell the business or shut the doors this will be true. If you deploy methods for automating data acquisition and feedback then you will also understand what you need to track and how to make your CRM database come alive. If you can do this adoption will be an afterthought and “feedback” will be the fuel to grow your business.